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I’d had enough of Hakata by then, so I went to Kagoshima, then took a boat to Amami-Oshima Island. I was still a virgin. What made it worse was that when I returned to school after a couple of weeks, I learned that the long-distance race had been postponed because of rain.

So now, at seventeen, I was still as pure as the driven snow. I knew one seventeen-year-old, however, who was getting laid left and right. His name was Kiyoshi Fukushima, and he was the bassist in Coelacanth, the band I played drums in. We called him Fuku-chan. Though only a teenager, Fuku-chan had the face of a middle-aged man. He was a big guy, too.

Both of us had been on the rugby team for part of our first year. The rugby clubroom was right next to the one for the track and field people. There was a second-year student, a sprinter who’d made a name for himself by setting the prefectural record in the hundred meters, and Fuku-chan and I bumped into him outside the clubroom one day. Even then Fuku-chan looked as if he were twenty-something, and the runner assumed he was an upperclassman and bowed and rapped out a hearty greeting. Fuku-chan thought this was amusing, so he played the part, saying, “Well, how’s it going, squirt? You getting any faster?” “Yes, sir,” said the runner, standing stiffly at attention. “I’m down to 10.4 in the hundred.” “Oh, yeah? Well, keep working at it. You’ll improve.” We both had a good laugh about this, but later, when the runner found out that he’d been taken for a ride, he and the other upperclassmen on the track and rugby teams beat the shit out of Fuku-chan.

Good old Fuku-chan. Whenever I asked him how one went about getting chicks the way he did, he always told me the same thing:
Don’t aim too high
.

The first thing I wanted to do to get our festival going was to make a film, and no sooner had Adama joined forces with us than he amazed me by getting his hands on an eight-millimeter Bell & Howell. He’d gone around asking all the younger kids if any of them had a movie camera, and when one said yes, he’d had Yuji Shirokushi, the head Greaser, threaten the guy till he handed it over.

The next order of business was to find a leading lady. I insisted it had to be Kazuko Matsui. Adama and Iwase both said I was dreaming. After all, Kazuko “Lady Jane” Matsui was such a stone fox that she was famous even in other schools in the city, and, what’s more, she was a member of the hallowed English Drama Club.

LADY JANE

Making films had been the hip thing to do ever since a Tokyo high school student beat all the veteran independent avant-garde directors to take a Grand Prix at the
Film
Biennale. Everyone agreed that film-making was the most advanced of the arts, and that it was
easy
, too. It’s funny: not one of us—Iwase, Adama, or me—had ever seen a single underground movie, yet we all dreamed of making one. It was like the French living on the Atlantic coast under the Nazi occupation, dreaming of an Allied
landing.

“
Okay, here’s how we’ll go about it. You listening? Never mind the Godard method—improvisation and all that. We’ll write a script. We’ll make it, you know, how should I put this, sort of, like, muddy, you know, Kenneth Anger style. And the camerawork we’ll do like Jonas Mekas.”

Adama and Iwase nodded and grunted their agreement as I rattled on, but the truth is that none of us had any idea what sort of film to make. All we knew was that we wanted to make one, like girls whose only ambition is to fall in love.

On a beautiful afternoon in late April, Iwase, Adama, and I, our hearts all aflutter, went to watch the English Drama Club rehearse. Those lovely young ladies, the pride of Northern High, were cooking up something by Shakespeare in the hope of winning first prize in the All-Kyushu English Drama Competition. The entrance to the auditorium was already overflowing with male students. Most of them were of the Greaser faction, and in the middle of the crowd stood Yuji Shirokushi in bell-bottom pants, snakeskin sandals, and a school uniform jacket with the collar unfastened. Shirokushi had been in love with Kazuko Matsui since our first year in high school. Why is it that the greasy hoodlum types always fall for the classiest women? It goes without saying that the object of his affection wouldn’t have been seen dead with him.

Shirokushi saw us and waved. “Ken-yan. What are you doing here?”

“Just, you know, thought I’d brush up on my English a bit.”

Shirokushi peered at my face and said, “Bullshit.”

Why is it that the greasy hoodlum types can always tell when a regular guy is lying?

“Who’d you come to see? Yumi? Masako? Mieko? Sakiko?”

Yes, there were any number of famous beauties in the English Drama Club. Iwase, Adama, and I exchanged glances, and suddenly Shirokushi seemed to get the picture.

“Don’t tell me... Not my little Kazuko? Eh? You came to see Kazuko?”

“Well, yeah, but it’s not what you think.”

The words were hardly out of my mouth when he whipped a knife out of his pocket and stuck it in my thigh. No, but he did grab me by the collar.

“Not even you can hit up on Kazuko and get away with it, Ken-yan,” he said menacingly, but when Adama told him to cut it out he immediately released me, smiled, and said, “Just kidding, just kidding.” Adama explained things to him.

“Yuji, you don’t understand, man. Ken wants to make a movie. You know the eight-millimeter camera we got off that kid? Ken’s gonna make a movie with it.”

“A movie? So what? What’s that got to do with Kazuko?”

“Well, you see, it’s just that we were hoping she’d agree to be the leading lady,” I said, trying to sound as
suave
as possible.

“Yuji, it’ll be the first time a student at Northern High ever made a movie. Who else could be the star, man? Huh? If we don’t get Kazuko Matsui to be the star, who we gonna get?”

Leave it to Adama to think of exactly the right thing to say. Shirokushi’s entire face lit up. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Who else could it be but Kazuko?”

“See what I mean? So if we don’t let Ken have a good look at her, how’s he gonna come up with the right image?”

Shirokushi nodded several times as Adama spoke, then took my hand and shook it, saying, “Yeah, that makes sense. But listen, man, you better make her look good. Better than Brigitte Bardot, even.” He moved up to the front of the crowd, kicking people in the butt to clear a space for us. The idea of making Kazuko Matsui the star of our film had excited him, and now he was rattling on about how we should use something by Yujiro Ishihara for the theme song, and how about if Kazuko played a bus guide who was raised in an orphanage, and he himself would be a hit man, see, and...

“Ken,” Adama whispered to me, “this is not cool. If Kazuko Matsui sees this she won’t want to be in the film.” He had a point. If Lady Jane saw us here with Shirokushi babbling, “movie movie movie movie,” she’d freeze us out completely. She hated the guy. Adama didn’t miss a trick.

“Ken, why don’t you go check it out for yourself. She’s probably in the room backstage right now.”

“What are you talking about? It’s all chicks back there.”

“You’re in the newspaper club, right?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, all you have to do is say you’re getting material together for an article.”

So I ended up going on my own to that holy sanctuary, the room that housed the English Drama Club. When I looked back over my shoulder, everyone in the auditorium was cheering me on. Some even waved their caps and shouted, “Go get ’em, Ken!” Adama, in the meantime, was trying to smooth things over with Shirokushi, who wanted to go with me.

The room smelled like a meadow full of flowers. It made you want to start singing
“Daisy Chain.”
My only problem was that I didn’t know what to say. To start off with something like “Er” or “Good afternoon” or “Excuse me” would have been too ordinary, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I was just toying with the idea of trying a bit of English when the faculty advisor for the club, a guy named Yoshioka, came striding out of the room toward me. He was a middle-aged pain in the ass who plastered his hair down with pomade and thought he was hot stuff because he always wore an English suit.

“What is it?” he said in a tone of voice that made it clear he meant,
How dare you set foot in this sacred place.

“I’m, uh, in the newspaper club. My name’s—”

“Yazaki. I know your name. I teach grammar to your class, for heaven’s sake.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you mean, ‘Yes, sir’? How would you know? You’re almost never there.”

Just my luck. I hadn’t expected somebody like this to appear and start laying a rap on me. With him in particular, I was at a disadvantage. Yoshioka was a bastard, but since he was also too much of a gentleman ever to hit anyone, I made a habit of cutting his class. I’d flunked his first exam, too. He peered at me from behind his black-framed glasses.

“So? “What do you want? Don’t tell me you want to join the drama club. You haven’t a hope.”

A burst of gay laughter came from inside the room. The foxes were listening to our little dialogue. I couldn’t afford to back down now.

“I’m here to research an article.”

“About what?”

“The war in Vietnam.”

“That’s news to me. You know how it works: first you ask the advisor of the newspaper club for permission, then the advisor talks to me, and I give the okay. You can’t just decide these things for yourself.”

In Kyushu, like everywhere else, high school newspaper clubs tended to be dens of rebellion, and in our school no club was allowed to align itself with any other. The teachers’ greatest fear was of the students getting organized. Even if members of the newspaper club wanted to do something as harmless as carrying out a survey or collecting information, we had to clear it with the faculty advisor first. Unofficial gatherings were absolutely forbidden. This system was endorsed by the student council. The school laid down the law and used the yes-men in the student council to make it look as if
we
had made the rules ourselves. It might as well have been a prison. A colony under military rule. It was sickening.

“All right, the truth is, I’m not really here to research an article.”

“What, then?”

“I just, uh, came to have a little chat.”

“Can’t you see we’re busy here? No one has time for that sort of thing.”

Inside the room, the girls were cutting stencils to use for mimeographing the script.
Squeak
,
creak
,
creak
,
squeak.
Half of them were ignoring Yoshioka and me, and the others were watching us. Kazuko Matsui was watching. She held a stylus thoughtfully against her cheek. She had eyes like Bambi’s. Eyes a man could fight and die for.

I sneered and said, “How ridiculous can you get?”

Yoshioka was taken aback. “What are you talking about?”

“Shakespeare—where’s that at? Thousands of people are dying every day in Vietnam, and you’re doing Shakespeare. It’s ridiculous. Mr. Yoshioka...”

“What?”

“Look out the window at that harbor. Every day American battleships sail out of there to go and kill people.”

He was flustered. Teachers this far out in the sticks didn’t know how to handle students with anti-establishment ideas. They couldn’t just slap you around, the way they did the usual deadbeat types.

“I’m going to report this to the teacher in charge of your club.”

“Do you
like
war, Mr. Yoshioka?”

“What sort of thing is that to say?”

Yoshioka had lived through World War II. He’d probably known his share of misery. His face clouded over. War was convenient. You could always use it in your arguments with teachers; it made them uncomfortable, particularly when they were obliged in class to say that war was bad. They’d always try to dodge the issue.

“Yazaki, get out of here. We’re busy.”

“Are you against war?”

I wondered if he’d served in the military. Being small, and an arty type, he would have been bullied like hell.

“If you’re against it, it’s cowardly not to speak out.”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“Plenty. American troops are using our harbor. To kill people.”

“That’s not for high school students to worry about.”

“So who’s supposed to worry about it?”

“Yazaki, deliver yourself of these opinions once you’ve graduated from college, got a job, married, and had children of your own. Once you’re a full-fledged adult.”

Dipshit.
“Deliver yourself,”
my ass.

“Oh. So you can’t be opposed to war unless you’re an adult? Does that mean children don’t die in war? High school students don’t die in war?”

Yoshioka’s face turned beet red. Just then the running coach, Kawasaki, passed by with the judo coach, Aihara. I didn’t notice them. I was telling Yoshioka that not to do anything about something was the same as approving of it, and asking him if it was okay for a teacher to approve of killing people, when Aihara came up behind me, grabbed me by the hair, slapped me across the face three times, and threw me to the floor.
“Yazakiiiiii!
” he shouted. Aihara was a bonehead from some crummy right-wing college, but he was also a scary guy with cauliflower ears who’d once been the national middleweight judo champion. “On your
feeeet
!
” he screamed. First he knocks me down, then he tells me to stand up. This pissed me off, but the cauliflower ears and squashed nose commanded a certain respect, so I rose groggily to my feet. “You little
turrrrd!
Who do you think you’re talking
tooooo!
” He slapped me again. The palms of his hands were thick and hard, so even a slap packed quite a punch. “For somebody who can’t even run a race you run off at the mouth just fine, don’t you?” This was Kawasaki’s contribution. Why did he have to bring up that race crap at a time like this? I could feel tears of vexation welling up in my eyes. If I cried, it was all over: Kazuko Matsui was watching. Aihara grinned. When you were a guy with a chip on your shoulder about graduating from some shit college, nothing in life gave more satisfaction than beating up kids like me. Yuji Shirokushi and his group got their share of grief from Aihara, too. During judo practice, he’d throw them down with a choke-hold, or crush their nuts, or hurl them against the wall, or grab them by the ear and kick their feet out from under them, stuff like that. You don’t stand much of a chance against a teacher with muscles.